Eli Shupe

We argue that three theses involving three separate areas of philosophy jointly yield an interesting but overlooked result. The first is from the metaphysics of mind, and says that everything is conscious (Panpsychism). The second is axiological, and says that, necessarily, every instance of consciousness is intrinsically valuable (Value). The third is from mereology, and says that everything has proper parts (Gunk). The result is that every non-panpsychist or non-gunk world of finite value is infinitely less valuable than the closest panpsychist gunk world. In short, if consciousness is intrinsically valuable then the joint obtaining of panpsychism and gunk would make a great many things—perhaps everything—better. In addition to its independent interest, this result shows that if consciousness is intrinsically valuable then the best of all possible appropriately finite worlds (and perhaps the best of all possible worlds, full stop) are panpsychist and gunky.

Despite a growing sensitivity to the ethics of whole body donation in the field of clinical anatomy, the remains of unclaimed individuals continue to be used in healthcare teaching and research throughout the USA. I argue that this practice is unethical because of its disregard for autonomy and consent, its potential harm to various individuals and groups, considerations of justice and the threat that it poses to public trust in medical institutions. Additionally, I show how the best available defences of the use of unclaimed bodies fail to be ethically persuasive. I argue that whole body donation ethically requires either the prior consent of the deceased or the explicit permission of their next of kin. Finally, I offer practical suggestions for institutions transitioning away from the use of unclaimed bodies.

In her recent book, L. A. Paul presses a serious problem for normative decision theory. Normative decision theory seems to be inapplicable when the values of potential outcomes are unknown, or when our preferences may change as a result of our choice. Paul then offers a framework for overcoming these problems, known as therevelation approach. I argue that, contrary to what Paul suggests, this approach is unhelpful in the large class of cases where the decision at hand centrally concerns persons other than the decision-maker. Unless Paul’s account is supplemented in order to handle such cases, many decisions will remain rationally intractable.

Instrumental reasoning is not just practically but also theoretically important. An agent capable of instrumental reason represents a state of affairs which they simultaneously realize does not actually obtain and have no inherent interest in obtaining, because they take its actualization to contribute to achieving a state they do desire. This makes it intuitive to treat instrumental reasoning as involving the sorts of abstract relations that are easy to encode linguistically, for instance with sentential modal operators, but that are more challenging for other, more expressively restricted formats. We offer an analysis of the cognitive capacities required for instrumental reasoning, review empirical evidence that some non-human animals possess at least some of each of these capacities, and suggest non-linguistic mechanisms by which they might be implemented.

I present a bipartite model of organ stewardship that places it at the intersection of resource stewardship and gift stewardship. Though both forms of stewardship are grounded in relationships of trust, they are importantly distinct, as are the duties they confer. This bipartite model of organ stewardship functions as a beneficial instrument for understanding and resolving conflicts among transplant stakeholders. As proof of concept, I apply the bipartite model of organ stewardship to a controversial case of conditional organ donation, showing that we can better understand the underlying moral conflict if we recognize that it involves a tension between resource and gift stewardship. Then, demonstrating that the model can do more than just explanatory work, I use it to resolve the long‐standing debate over whether organ transplant recipients are organ stewards. Although some transplant recipients are gift stewards, I argue, none are resource stewards, and they therefore do not owe anything to members of the transplant team.